Doctor Who - Revolution of the Daleks

When you’re good at something, never do it for free…and Chris Chibnall is good at being a terrible writer.  

Does anyone remember ‘Heaven Sent’, where the Doctor escaped a literally inescapable prison that was designed specifically for him? Well apparently, that prison was nothing next to the one that River Song escaped from on a weekly basis. 

 But that’s by the by; there’s far worse things about this episode. Starting at the beginning, having destroyed all of the continuity that was created by far more competent writers of the past, Chibnall has now even turned on his own past entries. 

Last year he turned in a New Year’s Day special, which could be described as ‘not terrible.’ It wasn’t good, but at the very least it was superior to the usual drivel that he normally scrawls on the back of cigarette packet five minutes before a deadline. 

 Seemingly not content with having demonstrated something approaching competence 12 months ago, Chibnall now takes the opportunity to retrospectively lower the quality of his one passible script. Once again the catalyst for the action is the Doctor’s incompetence; she apparently just left a Dalek shell to be picked up by anyone. 

 Keeping with this theme, no one on Earth remembers the multiple Dalek invasions; you know when they burst out of a void in Canary Warf and killed millions of people, and when they literally moved the whole planet to another quadrant of Space. Anyway, this collective amnesia means that only the ‘fam’ recognise the Dalek’s when they see one, but can’t get any help from the Doctor who’s making zero effort to escape prison.  Not to worry, Jack Harkness shows up to break her out. 

This is the first major problem; the Doctor is entirely passive in her escape from prison. No other version of the character would just sit there and be in prison. This continues the theme of the Doctor as incompetent; if Jack could think of a way out, the Doctor should have been able to think of ten. 

 Anyway the Doctor then makes it back 10 months after her ‘fam’ to receive a shove and an angry pout from Yaz. Did I miss something? Is Yaz her jilted lover or something? Also, all the Doctor does is apologise for being away for 10 months, when from her perspective she’s been imprisoned for more than 20 years. There’s no reason that she couldn’t simply answer with this, but doesn’t seemingly for drama. 

The most interesting dynamic between Clara and Twelve was that neither of them was ever willing to consider the other’s point of view. The dynamic between Thirteen and Yaz is that Thirteen just accepts whatever Yaz says as reasonable rather than ever standing up for herself. Call me old fashioned, but I think a protagonist who’s incapable of standing up for themself isn’t going to be convincing as a world ending super genius. 

 Anyway we move on to the Doctor lecturing the evil businessman about the dangers of messing with things he doesn’t understand. This is fine and in character, except it becomes pretty obvious that he isn’t doing that. The hipster who’s company he bought is doing that; but the Doctor lets him off, for…reasons. 

The Doctor’s end game of pitting Dalek against Dalek is a quite literal deus ex machina. 

 Tosin Cole takes his performance to new lows, with wooden line delivery from start to finish. It’s clear that he doesn’t care about the role and it’s difficult to tell if he ever did. He and Bradley bow out in an incredibly forced scene, that rips off Noel Clarke’s exit while someone losing all it’s meaning. 

 John Barrowman does his best to salvage his parts of the script, but is undermined by Chibnall’s inability to show rather than tell. At one point Barrowman delivers Jack’s signature camp indignation at his efforts being ignored. It’s obvious that this comes out of Jack’s insecurity, but Chibnall has to have Yaz say it, to make sure that the audience doesn’t miss it. Barrowman turns in one of the only decent performances, but has his writer working against him. 

 Overall, this was a poor and typical entry from Chris Chibnall that lowers last year's special by association.

Doctor Who: Ascension of the Cybermen

An entire story driven by in universe and real incompetence.

This story picks up where the last episode left off, with the Doctor having given away the weird sentient goo, turning up on a war torn planet to clean up her mess.

And boy does she suck at cleaning up a mess. This is apparently the same character who could turn an enemies armies around with a speech. The same character who could weaponise their surroundings to fight the very same villain. The same character who could perform trillions of calculations within milliseconds, in order to win a fight.

So it should come as no surprise that the Doctor’s clever defences are overwhelmed by ‘cyberdrones’ within seconds of the erected and she simply panics and tells everyone to run away. Bear in mind that this was her plan; she had time to draw on her thousands of years of warfare experience and come up with a rock solid plan of attack.

Placing this swift defeat of the Doctor in the context of the show as a whole, makes her seem significantly weaker and less intelligent then her predecessors.

Having the Doctor panic and simply say things like ‘they’re attacking our defences’ makes her seem plainly incompetent. Also, who is she saying this to? Did she think that her ‘fam’ didn’t notice that all the weird looking machines were being shot at? Did Chibnall think that the audience couldn’t figure out what was going on in front of us?

This scene was supposed to establish the Cybermen as a threat that can match the Doctor. However, it’s driven entirely by the Doctor being incompetent, rather than caught off guard and seems to suggest that Thirteen lost a lot of IQ points in the regeneration.

Also, is Seth McFarlane watching this, because Doctor Who just ripped off the drones from The Orville?

The ‘fam’ gets separated (through further incompetence) with Yas and Graham driving their part of the story through poor decision making and the Doctor and Ryan doing the same. There are other characters, but Chibnall doesn’t care enough to give them personalities, making them pretty obvious red-shirts.

Tosin Cole continues to phone in his performance throughout. I’m honestly not sure whether he’s a bad actor or whether he’s realised he’s in a bad show.

Mandeep Gil is endlessly annoying as Yas, but I’d put this more down to the writing and directing. She’s playing Yas like a pseudo-Doctor in this episode (clearly a writing choice) but we’ve never seen her do this before. With previous companions we’ve seen them progress from being out of their depth to being familiar with the Doctor’s lifestyle. The writing room treats the whole cast as tools for their plots rather than characters, so Yas has changed week on week depending on what the story needs her to do.

This results in her act of taking charge in this episode seeming like a bumbling idiot who read about how to survive an alien attack online and thinks they know everything. This type of arrogance literally got Clara killed in ‘Face the Raven’ but since the story needs Yas to survive, I’m sure it’ll just be the red shirts who bite the bullet.

Anyway, The Doctor, Ryan and a red-shirt find their way to a planet occupied by space-Barristan Selmy who protects a portal to Gallifrey. And then the Master jumps through and promptly demonstrates another area of writing that Chibnall is really bad at.

Remember in ‘World Enough and Time’ when Missy pointed out that Bill and Nadole were just there to provide comic relief and exposition. That wasn’t a simple case of her breaking the fourth-wall; it fit with her character in-universe, it was said casually so only the older viewers would notice it and it wouldn’t confuse the younger ones. But, above all, it was earned by the character development and story.

Sasha Dhawan jumping out of a portal and saying ‘that was a good entrance wasn’t it’ has been in no way earned by Chibnall. He has not developed this character or built up enough good faith with the fanbase to get away with trying to joke about how obviously forced the Master’s “dramatic entrance” was.

Oh and in the meantime of this episode an immortal Irishman has been doing Immortal Irishman things. The writing elsewhere was so bad that I don’t even care about who he turns out to be.

We’re coming to the end of series, where things will apparently change forever.

Chris Chibnall is not the right person to make a radical change to a franchise like this.

Maybe ‘change forever’ means being cancelled and coming back in five years as a couple of Netflix specials.